Infrastructure is a shared dream for a better tomorrow, built today. It requires long term thinking, solid engineering, and most of all a shared dream for a better future.
Althea created Cosmos Gravity Bridge as infrastructure for the Cosmos community.
We are proud to announce Cosmos Gravity Bridge - an independent and credibly neutral Cosmos-SDK blockchain providing the entire SDK community with a neutral bridge to Ethereum and eventually all major EVM chains.
An Eth peg zone was always the in roadmap of Cosmos, all the way back from the original whitepaper. Now that the Cosmos vision is finally coming to fruition, it’s time to bring Ethereum into the Interchain family.
- Marko Baricevicm Core Dev operating at Interchain Gmbh
What is The Cosmos Gravity Bridge?
Cosmos Gravity Bridge is a decentralized, neutral Cosmos blockchain whose primary purpose is to secure the operation of bridges between Cosmos based chains and other blockchain “layer one” ecosystems, starting with Ethereum.
Through IBC, many different cosmos based projects can connect and use the bridge to access ERC20 assets, like WETH, DAI, USDC, WBTC, and more, without having to operate the gravity orchestrator on their own chain.
Cosmos Gravity Bridge will be able to bring ERC20 assets from Ethereum into Cosmos, as well as Cosmos assets to Ethereum ERC20 representations. Assets from Ethereum will be able to flow into the Cosmos ecosystem and interact with the unique applications that exist in the Interchain, such as Akash Network, Sentinel, Regen and Osmosis. Meanwhile, ATOMs and any other asset in the Cosmos ecosystem, will be able to trade on Uniswap and other Ethereum AMMs, and interact with Ethereum DeFi like any ERC20 token.
Cosmos, Ethereum, and Gravity
Cosmos Gravity Bridge is a secure and highly efficient bridge between EVM and Cosmos SDK-based blockchains. At a high level, Gravity Bridge enables token transfers from Ethereum to Cosmos blockchains and back again, by locking up tokens on the Ethereum side and minting equivalent tokens on the Cosmos side.
www.gravitybridge.net
The Gravity Ethereum contract is highly optimized, utilizing batches to dramatically reduce the cost of Cosmos → Ethereum transfers. Sending funds from Cosmos back to Ethereum can be up to 50% less costly than a normal ERC20 send.
Why is Credibly Neutral Important?
With Cosmos Gravity Bridge and IBC, EVM tokens can be easily sent to any front end and traverse to any DEX or Cosmos blockchain. The value in the neutral Cosmos Gravity Bridge is not centered in trying to capture a user for any particular DEX or blockchain, instead Cosmos Gravity Bridge has value for enabling all traffic to pass along the bridge.
Lately, we have seen many different Cosmos blockchains integrate their own defi applications and versions of the gravity bridge, such as Umee, Sommelier, Injective and the Cosmos hub. These bespoke instances of gravity bridge work well for their intended use case, but are not suitable as an interoperable bridge, because misaligned incentives create the possibility of preferential treatment and preclude other defi applications from interacting with them. Divergent incentives often create silos and monopolization, whereas neutrality and interoperability supports healthy marketplaces with many participants.
A neutral Cosmos Gravity Bridge also lowers the barrier to access the liquidity of the Ethereum ecosystem and allows smaller or newer Cosmos blockchains to participate. The Cosmos Gravity Bridge is secured by the validator set of the chain and this may be a big lift for smaller chains to run on their own.
The credible neutrality of core Cosmos infrastructure such as Ethereum bridges is paramount to their wide adoption. Having a neutral Gravity Bridge that any and all Cosmos chain can coalesce on will be a massive UX win for entire ecosystem.
- Sunny Aggarwal, Co-founder of Osmosis
The value of interoperability.
The unbridged Cosmos ecosystem market cap is currently $30 bn whereas the Ethereum ecosystem market cap unavailable to Cosmos is $616 bn today (source: Messari Screener, Cosmos excluding BNB and source: Messari Screener, excluding BNB, including ETH)
Cosmos Gravity bridge will enable $30 bn of Cosmos market cap and $616 bn of Ethereum eco-system market cap to trade with each other. The value of interoperability has already been demonstrated by BNB, the common asset between these ecosystems, which commands a $75 bn+ market cap. Interoperability between ecosystems is a key reason why Binance has a premium.
Interoperability to date has required centralization as a key requirement, as seen in Binance, but the neutral Cosmos Gravity Bridge can give a DEX like Osmosis, Umee or Gravity DEX an opportunity to speak to a much larger market. Gravity Bridge offers flexibility to DEXs like Osmosis and even DAOs across both ecosystems to directly transact with each other. For example, an ERC 20 DAO treasury will have trouble holding UST in its treasury, but Cosmos Gravity Bridge will make that possible.
Bridging Ethereum and Cosmos with Gravity will create lots of synergy between grassroots ecosystems. At Tharsis, we are looking forward to new experiments in composability and plan to leverage Gravity on the Ethermint chain extensively.
- Akash Khosla, Co-founder of Tharsis (Ethermint)
Security Considerations
Security assumptions
Gravity is completely non-custodial. Control of the bridge mirrors the active validator set on the Cosmos SDK-based chain, and validator stake on Cosmos can be slashed for misbehavior involving the Gravity bridge.
"When using trust-minimized infrastructure, trusting the people responsible for the protocols that govern these networks is critical. Figment is proud to be part of helping to make Gravity Chain a decentralized, independent, and community governed bridge that connects the burgeoning Cosmos ecosystem with the bustling Ethereum ecosystem.”
- Gavin Birch, Ball of Light at Figment
Ongoing work
The Gravity Bridge has been continuously tested throughout 2021 by multiple ongoing test nets with a diverse group of validators. The current, long running test net has maintained 100 validators for over three months.
Audit:
Cosmos Gravity Bridge is currently undergoing an audit with Informal Systems. An upcoming crowd sourced audit review is planned, and many different participants will review the code, try to find bugs or vulnerabilities for rewards.
“The Gravity Bridge Blockchain will unlock significant liquidity that will flow from Ethereum into the Cosmos ecosystem, and enable permissionless access to more assets. We’ll see accelerated network effects begin to take shape, and the ecosystem as a whole will benefit tremendously," said Boz Menzalji, COO of Akash Network.
Next Up
Gravity Bridge $100k Code Review and Audit with Code4rena!
We’re aiming to help level up the security of the entire Cosmos ecosystem using a rigorous process that increases the quality of audits by attracting and incentivizing a swarm of reviewers to find as many rare and high risk vulnerabilities as possible in short, focused windows.
Cosmos Gravity Bridge will be the first Code4rena Cosmos contest, kicking off a two week audit on August 26 at midnight UTC.
You can compete for your share of the $100k+ prize pool by joining the ranks of our Cosmos wardens. Just hop into the #i-want-to-be-a-warden channel in C4’s Discord server to register.
Jaime Robles, @drawnbyjaime on Twitter
Code4rena’s model
C4 uses a novel competitive mechanism that allows for anyone to help secure protocols and platforms without having to be a full-time professional auditor. This approach is designed to increase the depth and breadth of an audit while incentivizing security researchers to find the highest-risk and rarest bugs.
Most contests run 1–2 weeks.
After sponsors review findings, an independent judge determines final severity. The entire prize pool is distributed with larger payouts for higher risk vulnerabilities.
Rather than taking the approach of ‘first person to turn in the bug gets the bounty’, the C4 model rewards everyone’s contributions even if there are multiple submissions of the same bug. --
Learn more at https://www.gravitybridge.net/
Join us for a Gravity Bridge AMA and community call Wednesday, August 25th, 11am ET.